Prior Bad Acts

45

LISKA HAD MANAGED to ferret out of the department computers the incident report from the death of Rebecca Rose Haas. Short and sweet. A detective named Rothenberg had gone through the motions of an investigation. He had retired six months later and moved to Idaho. She remembered his retirement party at Patrick’s, a cop bar strategically located halfway between the Minneapolis Police Department and the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office.

The situation seemed cut-and-dried. Rebecca Haas hadn’t had an enemy in the world. She had simply been one of many people who died accidental deaths in their own homes every year.

According to Rothenberg, a neighbor had spoken to her around two o’clock in the afternoon. Mrs. Haas had been excited at the prospect of taking in another foster child. Marcella Otis from Children and Family Services had been there earlier that week to go over some details.

Sometime between two-fifteen and four-thirty that afternoon, Rebecca Haas had apparently taken a header down the basement stairs. She had been found on the basement floor, dirty laundry all around her from the basket she had been carrying downstairs.

Liska pulled up in front of the Haas home, parked on the street again, and went up the sidewalk to the front porch. No one answered the door. Wayne Haas’s Chrysler was gone from the driveway.

She walked around the side of the house, thinking about Wayne Haas and his high blood pressure. Maybe he was inside, lying on the floor from having had a stroke.

Maybe he had decided to get the hell away from this place, chuck it all, and hop a bus to San Diego. Who could have blamed him?

She turned the corner to the backyard. Haas sat at a picnic table, his elbows on the table, his head in his hands.

“Mr. Haas?”

He raised his head and watched her cross the yard.

“I’m sorry to disturb your morning,” she said.

“Are you?”

He looked smaller somehow. Pale in the bright sunshine.

“You’re not coming to tell me you caught Dahl,” he said.

“No. I wish I could tell you that.”

“You’re here to accuse me of something, then? What? I haven’t been watching the television. No news but bad news.”

Liska sat down across from him at the picnic table and leaned her elbows on the tabletop. She had already decided not to tell him about Judge Moore’s abduction unless he brought it up himself. He would be less suspicious when she asked him questions about his son.

“Seems like it,” she said. “How are you feeling?”

He tried to laugh but didn’t have the breath or the energy for it. “What do you care?”

Liska sighed. “You know, we have to learn early on in this line of work not to put ourselves in the place of our victims or their loved ones. It’s too difficult, too painful, warps our sense of objectivity. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have feelings, Mr. Haas.

“I’m sorry for what you’ve had to go through,” she said. “I have two boys. And every day I see the things that happen, the things people will do… and I think about my kids. What if? What would I do? I don’t think I would be able to go on.”

Haas was quiet for a moment, looking off toward the wooded area at the back of his property. “You would,” he said at last. “You wouldn’t know how or why, but you would.”

“To see justice done?”

“I don’t know. What’s justice? It’s not what Karl Dahl was getting.”

“He will,” Liska said, though she had no idea if that would happen. Perps didn’t always get their just deserts in this life. That was one of the reasons she kept believing in God, the hope that he would kick ass in the afterlife.

“Sometimes it’s just anger that keeps you going,” he confessed. “And you think if you let that anger go, then none of it means anything.”

“Do you have anyone you can talk to about this?” Liska asked. “A friend? A minister?”

He tried again to laugh. “I don’t have anybody. Nobody wants to know me. It’s like they think it’s catching, that someone might come to their house and kill their family too.”

“You’ve got your son.”

“I’m supposed to be strong for him. He takes care of me like I was an invalid.”

“He loves you very much,” Liska said. “I’m surprised he’s not here with you.”

“He stayed the night with his friend, the Walden kid. He’s home too much. Sometimes I have to practically throw him out of the house, make him go be a kid. He hasn’t had a lot of opportunity to do that.”

“How old was Bobby when you and your first wife took him in?”

“Ten years old.”

“That must have been a big adjustment for all of you.”

Haas said nothing. He shook a cigarette out of a pack of Winstons and hung it on his lip. He looked past Liska as if she weren’t there.

“I understand his birth mother committed suicide.”

“Hanged herself,” he said, lighting up. “Right in front of him.”

“Oh, my God.”

Liska could only imagine what that would do to a child. Ten years old and forced to watch his mother kill herself. What must he have thought and felt? Helpless. Powerless. Terrified. Angry that his mother would leave him. Guilty, because children often feel responsible for bad things happening. Because their worlds revolve around them, they think that somehow they could have prevented them. If only he hadn’t thrown a baseball through the front window. If only he hadn’t gotten in trouble at school. If only he had meant enough to her…

“And then to lose your first wife, his second mother. That must have been tough on him.”

“She loved him,” Haas said. “Didn’t matter how difficult he could be. She just loved him.”

“Bobby told me he really liked Marlene too,” Liska said. “He said she was always baking cookies.”

Wayne Haas smiled a little at the memory before a cloud of grief settled over him, darker than before.

“Bobby told me you and he used to do a lot of stuff together,” Liska said. “Go fishing, play catch. He misses that. He misses you.”

His eyes rimmed red and he looked away from her, embarrassed he might cry in front of her.

“You need each other,” Liska said. “That’s the way you heal each other.”

She got up from the table and put a business card down near Wayne Haas’s hand, then walked away, feeling ashamed of herself for using the emotions of a broken man to get information about his own son.

At least she hadn’t left any scars. Guys on the job could bully a witness or a perp, scare them into cooperating. Being small and female, she was better off relying on gentler, sneakier ways of getting information. Not having a penis was, every once in a while, to her advantage.

Jerome Walden’s home was her next stop. The lovely and pleasant Mrs. Walden answered, hungover, wearing last night’s makeup, a leopard-print see-through wrap over a zebra-striped bra and panties. She should have been arrested for crimes against fashion.

Liska showed her ID through the screen door.

“What now?” the woman complained. “Is this about Ray Malone? I don’t know nothing but that he’s a son of a bitch, and he owes me money.”

“He give you that shiner?” Liska asked, referring to a black eye that was only just beginning to purple.

“I ran into something.”

Like a fist, Liska thought, but she didn’t pursue the issue.

“Is your son home?”

The woman looked suspicious. “Why?”

“Because I asked.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the one I’m giving you,” Liska said, annoyed. That women like this one were allowed to have children was beyond her. “I shouldn’t give you that much. The state this house is in, I should be calling social services.”

“Oh, fuck you, Little Miss Tweed Blazer.”

“You can answer one goddamn question, or I’m on the phone to report you,” Liska said forcefully. “Your kid gets taken away from you, so do the family aid checks.”

Jerome Walden’s mother scowled at her, trying to decide if Liska was bluffing, or maybe considering how the loss of that AFDC check would crimp her lifestyle.

“He’s not home,” she said.

“Where is he?”

“Like I’m supposed to know that? He’s practically an adult.”

From somewhere in the background came a loud male voice. “Hey, babe, where are you? Come suck my dick!”

Liska arched a brow. “Duty calls.”

The woman gave her the finger and slammed the door in her face.

What could she expect from a woman who mixed her animal prints?

With a mother like that, it was a wonder Jerome Walden wasn’t already on the most-wanted list.

But the larger question that loomed in front of her as she got back in her car and headed downtown was where Jerome Walden and Bobby Haas were and just what the hell were they up to.